What Descartes Knows

Here is a timid stab at poetry:

In air-conditioned fluorescence dim,
with hums of loud comfort I felt too full
of comfortless declarations grim.

Plato's cave was a pageant pure
next to the dim flickering shades
the prof projected, giving the tour

of dead men's ideas, embalmed in text--
until later animated
in clean ivory catacomb's next.

Cogito ergo sum, he said,
before he ceased his lofty summing.
He strains theories with this fact: he is dead.

What then is real? We'll never know.
For that only sure thing rots beneath
an old Paris church, just below

a modern replica, hewed from stone,
of an ancient wooden tool of dread,
lost since that day it served as a throne
and our sole certainty from Calvary shone.